In Putty, the option is "Sending of null packet to keep session alive (seconds between keep alives)"
Below is help info from Putty help doc. Maybe this will help you find an option in OpenSSH. Darren If you find your sessions are closing unexpectedly ('Connection reset by peer') after they have been idle for a while, you might want to try using this option. Some network routers and firewalls need to keep track of all connections through them. Usually, these firewalls will assume a connection is dead if no data is transferred in either direction after a certain time interval. This can cause PuTTY sessions to be unexpectedly closed by the firewall if no traffic is seen in the session for some time. The keepalive option ('Seconds between keepalives') allows you to configure PuTTY to send data through the session at regular intervals, in a way that does not disrupt the actual terminal session. If you find your firewall is cutting idle connections off, you can try entering a non-zero value in this field. The value is measured in seconds; so, for example, if your firewall cuts connections off after ten minutes then you might want to enter 300 seconds (5 minutes) in the box. Note that keepalives are not always helpful. They help if you have a firewall which drops your connection after an idle period; but if the network between you and the server suffers from breaks in connectivity then keepalives can actually make things worse. If a session is idle, and connectivity is temporarily lost between the endpoints, but the connectivity is restored before either side tries to send anything, then there will be no problem - neither endpoint will notice that anything was wrong. However, if one side does send something during the break, it will repeatedly try to re-send, and eventually give up and abandon the connection. Then when connectivity is restored, the other side will find that the first side doesn't believe there is an open connection any more. Keepalives can make this sort of problem worse, because they increase the probability that PuTTY will attempt to send data during a break in connectivity. Therefore, you might find they help connection loss, or you might find they make it worse, depending on what kind of network problems you have between you and the server. Keepalives are only supported in Telnet and SSH; the Rlogin and Raw protocols offer no way of implementing them. Note that if you are using SSH1 and the server has a bug that makes it unable to deal with SSH1 ignore messages, enabling keepalives will have no effect. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Rob Hudson" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "The Eugene Unix and GNU/Linux User Group's mail list" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Wednesday, November 12, 2003 3:43 PM Subject: Re: [eug-lug]mail over ssh > On 20031112.1352, Patrick R. Wade said ... > > > What are you using for the SSH client? You may be able to set it to > > send keepalives. I had a problem like you describe telecommuting from > > the Growers' Market to efn, and it went away when i set 2-minute > > keepalives in PuTTY. > > I'm using just straight OpenSSH. Man page doesn't mention any keep > alives for it. > _______________________________________________ > EuG-LUG mailing list > [EMAIL PROTECTED] > http://mailman.efn.org/cgi-bin/listinfo/eug-lug > _______________________________________________ EuG-LUG mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mailman.efn.org/cgi-bin/listinfo/eug-lug